'Voters are appalled expenses cheat can return to the Lords'

Lord of the Westminster manor: Tom Strathclyde holds forth in his office, which houses the oak desk used by his predecessor Willie Whitelaw

The Labour peeress who wrongly pocketed £125,349 in expenses should be barred from Parliament until she repays the money, the leader of the House of Lords has said.

In an exclusive interview with the Evening Standard, Lord Strathclyde said voters would be appalled if disgraced Baroness Uddin was allowed to retake her seat next year after an 18-month suspension.

The former London councillor falsely claimed second home expenses by pretending that a flat in Maidstone was her main residence. Her suspension is due to end next Easter.

"My view is she should not be allowed back until that money is repaid and we are looking into the legal implications of that," said Lord Strathclyde. "It is a great deal of money she owes. And although she was not prosecuted she was found to have broken the rules by a committee of the House and she really must repay the money before she comes back."

The senior Cabinet minister said the Upper House needed powers to eject peers altogether for serious misconduct so that "ones who went to jail would not return". Two peers jailed for expenses fraud have been told they can take their seats again.

Lord Strathclyde said: "Voters don't get a say - but voters are appalled that somebody could be found to have indulged in wrongdoing on this scale and come back to a senior legislature."

In a wide-ranging interview, he said there was "a good chance" that Nick Clegg's sweeping reform Bill to create an elected House of 300 senators will go through.

"Although there are some very good points about the House of Lords, I think that in the 21st century if you want real political power you need the consent of the people," he said. "A directly elected Senate would undoubtedly be more assertive but it would do a better job."

However, he admitted that the Labour and Conservative parties were divided on both the principle and the detailed options. "Nobody pretends it is going to be easy or quick," he cautioned. "On the contrary it will be dicey and it will take a great deal of time."

Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, aka the 2nd Baron Strathclyde, has been a peer since 1986 and has sat on the Tory front bench for almost half his 51 years. Tom Strathclyde, as he is known among ministers, was given his first job, in the whips office, by Margaret Thatcher - one of hundreds of prominent life peers who would be kicked out of Parliament under the Clegg proposals. Lord Strathclyde would prefer a fifth of the new House to be appointed to save some of those, preserving the maverick independence of the Lords backbenches.

"I would be sorry if we lost the likes of Margaret Thatcher. One of the joys of my job is that I'm surrounded by some of the most eminent political figures of the last 40 years.

"Lord Carrington [the former Foreign Secretary] goes back to the Forties. He is now 92 but his mind is as good as it was when he was in the Cabinet."

HOWEVER, despite Prime Minister David Cameron's announcement that a first-born daughter of William and Catherine will inherit the crown, Lord Strathclyde flatly rejected the argument that girls should inherit hereditary peerages.

"Monarchy affects one family and frankly not many people and is of premier constitutional significance," he argued. "None of these things apply to the hereditary peerage.

"There are many hundreds of families, many thousands of people. It is fiendishly complicated to change it."

Asked to give an example, he added: "There are titles that have property entailed on them. You do watch Downton Abbey, don't you? You can see the kind of complexities that can arise."

There is a touch of Downton's Lord Grantham about the Lords leader's relish of the traditions of Parliament. His office is dominated by a huge oak Pugin desk that he remembered from Willie Whitelaw's days but had been thrown out. He had a search carried out. "A week later they found it covered in dust in storage and had it polished up. Whitelaw was Leader of the Lords when I first came here and I remember being terrified at the thought of being summoned to his office."

Unlike Commons Speaker John Bercow, who paraded a new coat of arms featuring rainbows and pink triangles this week, Strathclyde inherited one with bear's heads on it, symbolising strength.

"Have you seen my estate?" he joked, striding out to a superb private terrace overlooking Westminster Abbey and Millbank. "This is where I come if I need my ego stroked - you feel like the Pope or Mussolini."

A governor of Wellington College, Berkshire, he called Michael Gove's huge increase in the fleet of academies as "one of the most important revolutions of the last 18 months" and also praised Labour's Lord Adonis.

And he heaped compliments on his Liberal Democrat deputy Lord McNally despite "occasional wrinkles" between the two Coalition parties, such as on the health Bill.

Lord Strathclyde, who had a brush with the tabloids this year when a former actress alleged an affair, has been watching the Leveson hearings on media ethics and feels sympathy for witnesses who complained of media intrusion.

He would "take a lot of convincing" that privacy laws are needed but said some form of agreement was needed. "There does need to be a new settlement between the press, the judiciary and Parliament on some of these very important issues."